Ford Madox Ford

Literary Birthday – 17 December – Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was born 17 December 1873, and died 26 June 1939.

Six Quotes

  1. Open the book to page 99 and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.
  2. You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.
  3. Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.
  4. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
  5. The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t.
  6. If you’re going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he’d better be real enough that you can smell his breath.

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic, and editor. His journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were important in the development of early 20th-century English literature. He is remembered for The Good Soldier, the Parade’s End series and The Fifth Queen trilogy. The Good Soldier is included among the great literature of the 20th century.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_Madox_Ford.jpg

The Edwardian Ford Madox Ford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 17th December 2012
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